From: "William A. Rowe, Jr." <wrowe@rowe-clan.net>
Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2001 4:14 AM
> Now I begin to wonder, if we created a fast_redirect method for mod_negotation,
> why on earth shouldn't mod_dir follow the same convention?
Following this little experiment one step further, I've come to some conclusions;
1. It's nicer. That is, if you set up a subrequest to /webfiles/index.html.en,
and look at its headers, you discover it's text/html, and in english. If you
execute the subrequest, you serve text/html english sub-content.
If you set up a subrequest to /webfiles/, although it _will_ serve content, you
don't know ahead of time that it happens to be english, in text/html. If you
execute the subrequest, you ACTUALLY serve text/html english sub-content. So
checking rr-> after a lookup doesn't do much for trust, does it?
2. It would be confusing to modules checking if /foo/ is a directory. Well gee
guys, it ends in a slash, must be a directory ;)
So, taking this all to it's logical conclusion, I've refactored a bit of the
autoindex code to do something equally useful - show DIRs as DIRs, in spite of
the mod_dir change.
I see two immediate opportunities to further improve mod_autoindex, but I don't
have the time to devote, I need to close the mod_negotation side of these issues.
a. A Really Cool feature would show Redirect entries [things in the directory that
would return an _EXTERNAL_ redirect] as an LNK (pointy finger and all.) But
more important to Apache, the href="" would contain the redirect RESULT :)
Now that saves a roundtrip to resolve something that we already could have
shared with the client.
b. This patch isn't ready to close since it doesn't address APR_LNK files. We
need to decide if this points at an APR_DIR in the first place, before all the
rest of the redirections. No good suggestion at this moment.
That's all I had to share, comments, anyone?
Bill